Oculus Shipping Early Builds of Final Rift Hardware This Week

Get ready developers. Oculus has just announced on their official blog that “early builds” of the final Oculus Rift hardware and Oculus SDK 1.0 will be shipping this week to developers. Sounds like Santa is bringing us just what we wanted almost in time for Christmas.

With today’s announcement that the Oculus Rift will make it’s way into the hands of developers this week and no news about pre-orders, it is looking less likely that we will get a pre-order announcement that Oculus had mentioned would happen “later this year” back in May.

Right now Oculus is prioritizing shipping the Rift to developers based on how close they are to a final game or application. “The Rift SDK 1.0 and runtime include features tied to the consumer product, so we’ve currently limited the release to developers putting final touches on launch titles.”

Oculus goes on to mention that they will be shipping Rift hardware out to developers every week in the run up to launch.

VRScout Eric testing the Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers

It is still unclear how close these Rift headsets shipping this week will be to what was previewed at Oculus Connect 2, but it looks like we will only have to wait a few more days to find out.